J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian

Character is a Victory, not a gift.

—J.A.F.

Sliding Toward Tasmania

He had been nothing but trouble for his father, a thorn in the archdeacon’s side. Now he sat alone at the Exeter College high table, after the other diners left, listening to the crackle in the fireplace and staring at nothing in front of his eyes. He had taken off his scholar’s gown, which lay in the chair next to him. He wore good worsted trousers that emphasized his long, lanky, athletic legs, and a dark gray jacket of a softer material that fit well and hung fine from his shoulders. It was the understated elegance of Oxford tailoring that proclaimed him a young man of some importance while discreetly draping the fire in his belly. He was tall, almost six feet, quite good-looking, with a long, pale face, strong nose, and cleft chin. His black hair was rather long and parted on the left side and his eyebrows emphasized his large dark eyes, which glowed with intellect and vivacity. Missing was the signature smile on his lips, commented upon by those who knew him through his life. Mysterious, that smile. The fact that it was missing while he sat there alone was proof, perhaps, that it was a smile used to reflect the smiles he met or to defend himself when people around him were far from smiling.

James Anthony Froude was thirty years old that February of 1849, and Anthony—as he was called—had just destroyed the future that fronted him. He had not dined at the hall, nor been there the afternoon when his newly published book,The Nemesis of Faith, was thrown into the flames—hellfire presumably meant for its author.

It was all over. His career, his life in Oxford, any chance of reconciliation with his father. Ashes. He knew his rebellious novel—about a Church of England cleric who doubted the divinity of Jesus Christ and had an affair with a sad married woman—would cause an uproar at Oxford. But Anthony could have no idea that the book would burst past the small, inbred community that nurtured him for the last twelve years and become a cause célèbre in the world at large—read in the English-speaking world, debated in France, admired in Germany. It would make him famous in forward-thinking communities, and infamous everywhere else. Everyone who was anyone would talk about it, write about it to friends, or pen an opinion for the newspapers.The Nemesis of Faith would become the most relevant book of its day, speaking out to the wrenching religious doubts of an entire generation.

This would be Anthony’s last night at Exeter College, sitting alone and dejected at the high table. A few years before at the same table he had stirring conversations with the visiting American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson—a man who had long since given up his ministry in the Second Church Boston and set out on a spiritual quest. In Emerson, Anthony met a truly original thinker. Added to that, the American was a close personal friend of the author whose works were indelibly altering Anthony’s views: Thomas Carlyle, by the 1840s an increasingly world-famous figure. In these men Anthony discovered a power and earnestness at least equal to that of the most brilliant of the Oxford churchmen: With this difference: that I was no longer referred to books and distant centuries but to present facts and the world in which I lived and breathed.

The emotional and intellectual kinship that Anthony felt for Emerson was enhanced by Emerson’s face, which so resembled John Henry Newman’s, who had attempted to bring Anthony to a different light: Lead kindly Light, amid the enduring gloom, Lead thou me on. The future Cardinal Newman’s poem is still sung, but Newman was no longer leading Anthony on. Emerson encouraged the doubt-ridden, emotionally torn Anthony in a new direction. Inspired him to go into the wilderness over his long vacation from his students, his Oxford, to go back to Ireland, not as a tutor or a traveler this time, but in a Thoreau-like manner, just to write. Which he did. After all, it was 1848, the year of revolution all through Europe, and Anthony was a radical, a Red, thoroughly believing that everything was wrong and on the eve of great change.

Well, now it was 1849, and after all the Sturm und Drang and European bloodletting of the previous year, nothing much had changed, except Anthony was true to his own inclinations, wrote down exactly how he felt for everyone to read, and for that, in Oxford in 1849, one must face the consequences.

He thought he was ready. Had written offhandedly, debonairly, of his coming downfall to his friends the poets Arthur Clough and Matt Arnold. And to that Cambridge man, Charles Kingsley, the Low Church cleric who (unlike Anthony and his friends) stuck to his religious calling. Anthony knew what the future would bring. Exile and cunning. He would leave England; after many inquiries he’d found a post directing a school in Tasmania—a new British colony then called Van Diemen’s Land. His disappointed father was willing to finance his youngest child one last time, with the vague hope that immigration to the colonies might make a man of Anthony yet. All this beforeThe Nemesis of Faith was published.

Anthony considered himself more than ready to give up his fellowship, the possibility of a church living, England itself. Though he was steady—and quite witty—in anticipation, his bravado buckled when the rector of Exeter College did not want to shake his hand, even if it was only to say good-bye. Couldn’t Rector Richards appreciate his honesty—an honesty the rector himself urged of Anthony?

As usual, Anthony was callow when it came to consequences—half naive, half devil-may-care—a youngest son in this as in everything. He purposely publishedThe Nemesis of Faith not only under his own name but with his title: J. A. Froude, M.A., Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. The rector, who had protected Anthony two years earlier when Anthony published his autobiographicalShadows of the Clouds, under the pseudonym Zeta, now had more explaining to do, more irate letters to answer, other hands to shake.

Not for the first time in his life, Anthony brooded over his fate.

The father Anthony could not please was the Archdeacon Robert Hurrell Froude (1769-1859), a well-to-do, landed clergyman and important Devonshire church administrator who was fifty years old when Anthony, his youngest child, was born at Dartington Parsonage. There are no memorials to the Venerable Archdeacon of Totnes. His marble or bronze bust cannot be found among other Devonshire archdeacons commemorated at Exeter Cathedral. No mention, either, that he fathered three sons of genius, each of whom brought something new to the nineteenth century before receding into its very texture: Hurrell, the theologian who along with John Henry Newman rocked the Church of England; controversial Anthony, the prose artist and historian who, at great expense to his self-worth, would raise the art of biography to the modern standard; and William, the scientist, engineer, and first naval architect, who invented the bilge keel, used to steady every commercial and warring ship in the seas, and who was considered the greatest of experimenters and investigators in hydrodynamics well into the twentieth century.

The parsonage of Anthony’s birth was among the calm and beautiful rolling hills of Dartington, above the thriving town of Totnes, the highest navigable point of the River Dart. Age-old Totnes came into its own in Elizabethan times, when this charming inland port was the center for exporting cloth to France and importing wine. Anthony’s father was raised there. Should he take a stroll along the high street today, the Venerable Archdeacon of Totnes would certainly be astounded by the life-size Buddha in the window of the Eclectic Englishman. Small shops thrive on both sides of the winding hill of a main road, selling crystals and incense and herbal cures and the best fudge, as a later generation searches for organic truth and variations of sixteenth-century fruit still flourishing in the trees behind Totnes’s picturesque church. The Old Forge, across the bridge above the River Dart, no longer uses its dungeons as the temporary prison for Puritans caught on their way to Plymouth, the resident blacksmith ready and able to custom-make their shackles. Instead it is an inn serving an excellent breakfast and sporting a hot tub for its guests.

Nineteenth-century Totnes and environs, squeezed in between Henry VIII and the New Age, was a less emphatic place, though quite vulnerable to the power struggles between church and state ripe at the time, keeping the archdeacon busy both as church administrator and advisor to the famous High Church Archbishop of Exeter, Henry Philipotts.

Anthony was born long past the days when his tall, distinguished father was a snappy dresser and renowned horseman. At Oxford he had leapt the turnpike gate on Abingdon Road without displacing one of the pennies placed strategically between his limbs, his seat, and his horse. But the archdeacon had no fond memories of his youth. Those were the days when I was an ass, he cautioned his youngest son. Though he never fell into debt or other irregularities he did have a weakness for his appearance. I laugh when I think of it, Anthony wrote, for the old man he knew was completely indifferent to such things.

Still, the archdeacon retained the good bearing and good looks of the Froude men—if not an interest in fashion. He had married Margaret Spedding, a beautiful and brilliant woman from a very good, intellectually distinguished family—particularly in the area of science. A remarkably handsome couple, they balanced one another. Margaret, a born writer, mingled a love of virtue with psychological insight in her daily journal. The archdeacon prided himself on duty, practicality, horse sense, stables. He was the first to admit that he was not a man of theory, not that he downplayed a philosophical mind like that of his wife or the Oxford men who at times sought his advice. Although he wasn’t a man to show his feelings, one can see them in the sketchbooks he left behind, vital drawings and washes of churches, churchyards, tracery, trees, and the surrounding sea. The couple were quite happy in those early days, before they realized Margaret Spedding brought tuberculosis to the marriage.

There was nothing but joy when their first son was born on March 25, 1803. Richard Hurrell (known as Hurrell) and thirteen months later, Robert. Hurrell and Robert, being my father’s eldest children and therefore nearer to him in age, were his companions in the sense which the rest of us never were. They were both interesting boys, tall, handsome, and brilliant. They shared my father’s leisure, and went with him into the hunting field, to which he still gave such time as he could afford. They had my mother’s influence to moderate and guide them and keep open the affectionate understanding between father and children. These two oldest were sent to Eton. They were not particularly studious, but they were light, bright, and popular, Hurrell showing signs of real genius. The relations between them and my father and mother were of unbroken affection and confidence, a confidence which from the difference of age, especially after my mother’s death, could not be extended to the rest of us.

There was a space of four years in which the couple enjoyed their first two sons before four more children arrived—John, Margaret, Phillis, William—one a year, then a breathing space of four years before the birth of daughter Mary. Finally, after another four years, on Shakespeare’s birthdate, April 23, Anthony was born in 1818. As a child he wondered if his white-bearded father knew the patriarch Abraham in biblical days.

His old and remote paterfamilias had never known a father himself and was raised in a household of women. Anthony recalled:

"My grandmother who had country blood in her veins, considered of later years that she had made a rash mesalliance. I have heard her say that she was a fool to marry. She had everything a young woman could desire; a kind father, an ample property. Her picture had been painted by Sir Joshua. What could have possessed her? It can be alleged only in her excuse that she was very young, scarcely turned sixteen when she so committed herself. In five or six years, she was left a widow with four children, three girls and a son the Archdeacon my father, who was born after my grandfather’s death. She survived her husband more than sixty years, and lived, as she used to tell us children with pride, to be a great grandmother. She removed in her widowhood to Totnes, where she brought up her family on a narrow income with care and thrift, care so excessive that in her later years it developed into a disease. On her death, my father found hoards of gold secreted about the house in which she lived—goold she called it—and was rather ashamed of the sack of sovereigns which he was obliged to carry to the bank."

Anthony, the last of eight children, would never know mother love. My mother was already in a decline when I was born. I was a sickly child and was christened privately at home as it was not supposed that I could live to be taken to church. My mother had nursed my brothers and sisters. Me she could not nurse. I was consigned to a healthy young woman of the parish who had lost her own baby, and to her I believe I owe it that I survived and still survive. About a month and a half before Anthony turned three, his mother died.

The archdeacon dealt with the grief of his wife’s death, the burden of a last infant, and the tuberculosis poised to ravage his children, with the strongest resource in his arsenal—silence. His wife’s effects were all disposed of (perhaps he felt that could exterminate contagion) and Anthony never heard him speak of her again. The fact that the dreaded disease came from his wife’s line was etched into that silence. The archdeacon became more severe and silent as circumstances turned his life into unrelenting duty, not the least responsibility for a weak, overly fearful infant son born long after the others, a son who would remember nothing of his mother, except, at times, a far-off whisper that might have been her voice.

Anthony’s first memory was of being struck for dirtying his baby frock. We were a Spartan family. Whipping was always resorted to as the prompt consequence of naughtiness. When Anthony’s spinster aunt Mary, who had nursed her consumptive sister Margaret, stayed to take care of the motherless family, she woke the sickly toddler at dawn each day, brought him outdoors, and dipped him into a gravel pit filled with ice-cold water in order to toughen him, improve his health. His father approved, as did his oldest brother, Hurrell, fifteen years Anthony’s senior, and the pride of the Froude name. Hurrell Froude—tall, slender, with black curly hair and coal black eyes of bright intensity, Byronic in looks and repartee—was a born leader, known for his romantic imagination and otherworldly piety. His brilliance lit up his pious nature, his words sparked thunderclaps.

My father was infinitely proud of Hurrell and let him do as he pleased. I worshiped him, but I cannot say that I think his educational experiments were always successful. He thought that I wanted manliness. A small stream ran along the fence which enclosed our garden. I remember Hurrell once when I was very little taking me by the heels and stirring the mud at the bottom with my head. Another time I have a vivid recollection of being put overboard into deep water out of a boat in the river again to make me bold, which it didn’t make me at all.

Young Anthony had an escape from early-morning baths in gravel pits, from a bullying, pious brother, and a remote, punishing father, when he was sent to Buckfastleigh School, hardly a five-mile stroll from his home. Even so, the eight-year-old was forbidden to return to the parsonage except during school holidays. His father had the peculiar idea that a child should not consider that he had a home. Perhaps banishment was a blessing. For the schoolmasters and the schoolchildren were not punishing. Better yet and quite uncharacteristically, at this school, bullying was by common consent treated as a public crime. This was particularly helpful to Anthony, since he suffered from a hernia, which prevented him from fighting and taking part in the rough games of the playing field.

At Buckfastleigh even the punishment meted out for bullying was considered tame—for the times: A lad who was guilty of persecuting any smaller boy was made to kneel with bare back on the schoolroom floor, and was flogged, buffeted we called it, every boy striking him one blow with a knotted handkerchief. I can see a poor boy now on his knees, with tears in his eyes, suffering more from the shame than the pain of the blows.

Of course, it was de rigueur that the teaching at the school was quickened into effectiveness by the vigorous and frequent application of the cane, particularly since the more severe whippings, called birchings, were infrequent and resorted to only for such disgraceful offences as theft or lying. Canings, birchings, floggings, were all hallmarks of a young gentleman’s education.

Away from the family, Anthony, who hadn’t been a particularly accomplished toddler—he was born to a household of brilliant siblings—flourished intellectually, learned Latin rapidly, and found a special aptitude for Greek. His enthusiasm for classical study was boundless and he was soon in a class all his own. "Before I was eleven I had read all theIliad and theOdyssey twice over."

The child could recite hundreds of lines of Greek, commit hundreds more to memory on short notice, a talent for which, at home on holiday, he was rewarded. But this precocity turned into a curse. A shilling did not compensate for the fact that he now had the misfortune to be considered a genius, to be advanced beyond his age, and to encourage expectations. During school vacations he must work, work, work without pause or relief. It was drudgery year in and year out. It did me no good. I was forced like a sickly plant in a hot-house: a bad preparation for the rough weather I was soon to face.

Even Hurrell, who had frightened the wits out of his baby brother with ghost stories and harsh teasing, wrote to their brother William when Anthony was nine: I think I can explain to you the allusion Aunt Mary makes at Att’s promotion. For a day or two before I left home news was brought us that he had been put up into the class above him. I am afraid he is being pushed on beyond his age so much that it will make him stupid, for I am sure it is not a good thing for boys in general to live so much among fellows much older than themselves.

The archdeacon, the sensible, strong, practical churchman who never spoke even in private of feeling or sentiment, and never showed any in word or action, thought differently, and expected return on his shilling. His youngest son was the last of a large family and must pull his own weight in the world, make his own living. Anthony must study, study, study, in order to be eligible for early admission to public school (private school, in American parlance) and from there to early admission on scholarship to Oxford. With the expectation that Anthony would follow in his father’s clerical profession, the boy was sent to Westminster at the age of eleven.

If the brutality of English public school education—around the time Dr. Arnold (Matt’s father) was reforming Rugby—was to be described in one word, that word would beWestminster. It was an absolutely dreadful school in that respect, considered so at the time. Physical punishment was extreme, causing enrollment to drop year after year. To send a precocious eleven-year-old there, one who did so well on entrance exams that he was placed among boys sixteen and seventeen, was a terrible cruelty. His father was advised to allow Anthony to board at one of the many houses in the vicinity catering to younger students, but the archdeacon and Aunt Mary refused to shield the boy, deciding that being thrown in with the older set would be good for the child’s character.

At eleven, physically frail and weak, intellectually overdeveloped, the boy was sent to live in one large and dismal dormitory room with thirty-nine boys much older and stronger than he, upperclassmen bred to systematic bullying: The rule was that we were to learn by suffering. The dormitory was kept so cold that in the winter the boys put water on the stone floors so that they could slide on the ice that formed. The fagging system, in which the younger is servant/slave to the older, turned Anthony’s young life into a living hell far worse than being plunged into gravel pits or having one’s head used to stir mud at Dartington Parsonage: I had my legs set on fire to make me dance. When I had crawled to bed, I have been woke many times by the hot points of cigars burning holes in my face. Simply put, he was brutalized and came to see himself as a victim of fate. In his first novella,Shadows of the Clouds, he wrote that his life was as hard, and the treatment as barbarous as that of the negroes in Virginia, and he fleshed out the method of his torture, of how the older boys would stalk the college at midnight, stop by his bed as he slept, how one would hold him down while another burned him with his cigar until his face was scarred and blistered for weeks. He was not exaggerating. His own son, Ashley, would write way into the twentieth century that the best said of his father’s education was that he survived it.

He was made to swallow brandy punch till he was drunk, and at meals the sixteen-year-olds kept the meat for themselves and gave this weak child the bones. He couldn’t defend himself, either physically or emotionally. No father or older brother or friend had taught him how. Only a friendly cook at a nearby boardinghouse kept him from starving. The code of honor was never to tell on another boy. He took to lying, invented excuses of illness that were easily found out. The headmaster thought he was trying to escape lessons, instead of the young tyrants up the college stairs. Anthony later wondered if the headmaster would have made any changes even if he knew the truth. As it was, his behavior was constantly complained of to his father.

After three years Anthony, fourteen and still frail for his age, could not return; he had suffered what we would consider a severe nervous breakdown. He could hardly speakat all, not to mention that he had lost his fluency in Greek and Latin along with his good clothes, sold to keep the bigger boys in stationery. Younger boys’ buying the older boys school supplies was such a standard practice that most fathers opened accounts for their sons with local shops to facilitate the trade-off—but not the archdeacon.

He could not tell his father the truth when he arrived at the parsonage mute and in tatters, that he sold his clothes for protection money. Of course his fatherknew his best clothes were gone,knew he spent all his money, no matter how Anthony equivocated. Both Hurrell and the archdeacon considered him a cowardly, unmanly boy, a liar and a cheat. And so he was—to himself as well—though a softer later era might allow for extenuating circumstances. Without putting too fine a point on it, by attempting to wiggle out of an unbearable situation, Anthony was learning how to survive. And a survival skill once learned is rarely forgotten.

His father did not leave it to Hurrell but beat him himself for his lies, his tattered state, and academic failure. Punishment not prevention was the old-fashioned principle he was raised by, described inShadows of the Clouds: If a boy goes wrong whip him. Teach him to be afraid of going wrong, by the pains and penalties to ensue—just the principle on which gamekeepers used to try to break dogs. Don’t attempt to talk to him, reason with him, offer him advice on how to control the impulses that boil up inall boys. Simply beat the boy out of him. Unfortunately, with the human animal the consequences could be disastrous, for untutored youths began to believe theydeserved their whippings, as if they could have helped doing what they did in a way dogs cannot.

The archdeacon envisioned an academic career and then a clerical living for his youngest son, and was bitterly disappointed by Anthony’s failure at Westminster. As always he met adversity with silence. When his favorite daughter died of tuberculosis, his parishioners were amazed to find him at church as usual, conducting services, while she was laid out at home. He was in his midsixties, having to deal with the dreaded disease he never named, as well as with a wretched fourteen-year-old who was taciturn and told lies.

AU Anthony saw was a distant father, a severe old man who despised him. At home under his father’s roof, he was an outcast in the midst of plenty. The tailor was no longer allowed to make new clothes for him. His coat was refashioned out of his brothers’ throwaways. No wonder his favorite Bible story was Joseph and his coat of many colors.

The father punished the wayward boy with silence. Anthony no longer seemed to have a tongue in his mouth, so no one was allowed to talk to Anthony, either. Daily he was made to feel worthless. Silence was lifted only to tell the boy time and again that he would not go to Oxford but instead would be apprenticed to a trade. Anthony considered that option good enough for such an unworthy son as himself. And in any case, it hardly mattered. He was broken. His self-worth had been beaten out of him and his chief consolation was that he was sure he would soon die. His exceedingly handsome and equally good-natured brother Robert, the next to oldest, who had treated him kindly, and whom he loved dearly and trusted, had died of tuberculosis when Anthony was ten, and signs of the dread disease were evident in Hurrell. My complexion, my sickly body, Anthony wrote, marked me for a certain victim. He looked forward to his death, adding yet another flaw to his character—self-pity.

Yet at fourteen, stuck in Dartington Parsonage, waiting to die, he witnessed one of the most important religious movements of the nineteenth century. At Oxford, brother Hurrell had met classmate John Henry Newman, a young man from a more pedestrian background, who was using his highly developed intellect to find his way to God. They were both young churchmen at Oxford, both with brilliant clerical and scholarly careers ahead of them, and they became best friends. Much later in the century, a follower and biographer of Newman would have a dream that he was at a dinner party with a veiled woman beside him whose conversation was so enticing that he told her, I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman at Oxford. She raised her veil: I am John Henry Newman.

At Oxford, Hurrell and Newman were joined by Hurrell’s former Oriel College tutor John Keble. Keble considered himself a country cleric, though he was also a distinguished don and author of the lauded book-length poemThe Christian Year. Not a household in English-speaking Christendom lacked a copy of that celebrated work, in those days. The three, Hurrell, Newman, and Keble were writing a series of Tracts for the Times. These tracts were intent on purging the Protestant elements of the Church of England, and thereby returning the church to its earlier authoritarian, Catholic roots. Particularly the tracts upheld the supremacy of church over state, as before Henry VIII. What had begun among the dons and fellows of Oxford, in a cloistered, clergy-ridden university town, would soon rock the Church of England to its foundations, altering perception and practice. The Oxford Movement, it would be called, and those churchmen, some young, some already eminent, became known as Tractarians.

Hurrell and Newman were often at Dartington Parsonage to consult with the practical archdeacon, Keble often writing to him to make sure there was nothing heretical in their tracts before each was published. Anthony was privy to these conversations.

Anthony listened to Hurrell, who hated the very idea of marriage and would not have the word uttered in his presence, talk at home against the Anglican practice of allowing priests to marry. Reform was needed. Newman, as charismatic, delicate, and brilliant as the dream of him, would write in his autobiography that he had a revelation at the age of fifteen that he would never marry. Hurrell’s radical opinion of returning the Anglican clergy to celibacy struck a chord with him, just as all of Hurrell’s ideas on restoring earlier church practices influenced Newman. When Hurrell’s youngest sister Mary became engaged, Hurrell wrote revealingly to Newman, Mary is going to be married to a very nice fellow down here. If he was not a parson I should have no kind of objection to it, but as it is they will have trouble in the flesh.

It had been to the Protestant elements in the Church of England that Anthony was raised. His father had always been "an excellent parish priest of the old sort, with strong sense, a practical belief in the doctrines of the Church of Englandas by law established, which no person in his right mind would think of questioning." The archdeacon taught his children that their business in life was to work and to make honorable positions for themselves, that religion was the light to see their way along the road of duty.

That religion of Anthony’s childhood, described nostalgically inThe Nemesis of Faith, was no introduction to otherworldly theological speculation, but was a series of healthy young Sundays; they were all bright. The walk to church in one’s Sunday clothes through the woods and meadows, the sense of special meaning among the congregation, the prayers said together, the music, even the long sermons had a Sunday shine to them when recollected. The sacredness of Sunday is stamped on the soil of England, and in the heart of every Englishman; and all this by the old Sundays we remember the first ten years of our lives. But then: Just as I was leaving off being a boy, we fell under a strong Catholicising influence at home, and I used to hear things which were strange enough to my ear.

His father always left the theorizing to Hurrell and Newman, admitting readily that he was no philosopher, and maintaining his stance as a nuts-and-bolts church administrator. The archdeacon was a busy man, overseeing his lands, modernizing the roads of his district, advising the Archbishop of Exeter at a time when the politicians were keen to eliminate the sinecures of the churchmen. He was more than proud and justified when Hurrell, along with Newman and Keble, came together on a political matter and defeated the reelection of Robert Peel, at the time an odious radical member of Parliament, later the Conservative prime minister. To Anthony’s father, the Oxford Movement, initiated by his son, his son’s best friend, and his son’s former tutor, offered the hope of something quite practical, a return to the church’s authority over the ever-expanding liberalism of the state.

However, listening to brother Hurrell and Newman talk was a form of shock treatment to Anthony, who had a theoretical mind and realized how much of what they called a return to Anglo-Catholicism was dangerously close to Roman Catholicism. The thrilling, disconcerting conversations jolted him back to his books. He began reading once more in his father’s library, and the archdeacon, remote but watchful, saw some hope for his wayward son: If Anthony falls into good company I feel sure that his conduct will be everything a parent can wish, but he wants that manliness of character which enables a lad to steer a strait course if he meets clever lively companions that would lead him out of it, he wrote Keble. Carefully, and with more concern than Anthony was privy to, the archdeacon found a suitable tutor for his impressionable son in a town close to Oxford.

However, the archdeacon had greater concerns at the time. Advanced signs of tuberculosis—cough, fevers, the extraordinary shine of the eyes—were evident in Hurrell, as much as Hurrell and all who loved him wished to deny them. As soon as Anthony was sent off to be tutored, the archdeacon and John Henry Newman accompanied Hurrell to Italy in the hopes it would improve his health—a trip immortalized in the later Cardinal Newman’s spiritual autobiography,Apologia pro Vita Sua—and in the inspired unpublished sketches of the archdeacon’s.

For Hurrell there was Italy, and later Barbados, but in February 1836, in the dead cold of winter, he came home to Dartington Parsonage through a terrific snowstorm. From day to day almost we could perceive that his body was wasting and his strength giving way, the archdeacon informed Keble. Oxford and the friendships he had formed there, seemed to be always in his thoughts, but I cannot trust myself to say more. To me he was not only a most affectionate son, but my companion and familiar friend, entering into my pursuits and amusements, and guiding me by his advice when I needed it. I pray God Almighty to support me through this heaviest of earthly trials.

So weak had Hurrell become toward the end that he hadn’t strength enough to clear his throat. On a cold winter Sunday the grieving father observed a sudden difficulty in Hurrell’s breathing, a failed attempt to swallow, an attempt to speak, and then, after a slight struggle, suffering was over. At the age of thirty-three, Hurrell drowned in his father’s arms. My dear son died this day, the archdeacon wrote, describing the scene to Newman.

Then he swiftly moved on to practical matters. Son William, silent William who would always mediate family affairs, would be going up to collect things from Hurrell’s rooms at Oxford. It will be desirable perhaps if the rooms are not considered too good for an undergraduate that Anthony should be permitted to take them. But William will talk to you on the subject—& if likely to succeed speak to the Provost. And, of course, Newman was to take anything he wished in order to remember Hurrell.

A week later the archdeacon explained to Newman why he wrote on practical matters the very evening of Hurrell’s passing (our separation, he called the death). We find in his spare words an essential glimpse into the character of the Archdeacon of Totnes, as revealing as the sketchbooks he left behind him, devoid of people, filled with a glorious—yet exact—rendering of place: I could not trust myself nor can I now, to touch on my own sorrows.

Later, Anthony, too, would see beyond the paternal severity that so marked his childhood, to the suffering and anxiety for him and his siblings that lay beneath it. Discipline and horse sense marked the way that this high and dry church administrator and landed gentleman kept his sanity and did his duty as year after year God tested him the way he tested Job. May God in his Mercy, the archdeacon prayed out loud to Newman, turn sufferings into spiritual profit.

All the manuscripts I can find will be delivered to you by William, the Archdeacon continued. Hurrell’s journal is very interesting to myself as bringing to my recollection many passages of his life, and a progressive picture, as it were, of his mind, when his thoughts and pursuits began to shew promise of his advancement to everything that was good. Hurrell’s memorial would be four volumes of his literary remains, a collection of journal entries, prayers, thoughts, letters, essays, sermons, partially financed by the archdeacon and edited by Newman with the help of John Keble. And so the archdeacon occupied himself, as Anthony entered Oxford: It is one of my few consolations whenever his loss occurs to me, & it is hardly ever out of my mind—to turn to letters & journals that almost bring back to me the reality of bygone days.

These religious daybooks of Hurrell’s (the practice of keeping a journal he learned from his mother) are full of morbid self-examination. Hurrell describes how he humiliates his flesh, how he fasts—painful to read, the relentless starving of his own tubercular body. He atones for nameless sins, among them an avalanche of confused feelings for one of the boys he tutors at Oxford. What should be included, what excluded, what might the public misinterpret? The archdeacon senses danger, but as always, leaves such decisions to the philosophic minds of Oxford. In unpublished letter after letter he tells Newman and Keble to decide. His role is to finance the publication of theRemains of the Reverend R. Hurrell Froude (and to wait anxiously for the reviews).

Newman committed Hurrell’s fasts, his self-flagellations, his exaggerated sense of his own worthlessness to print, did not edit out the more startling practices (or the young boy). He had to be aware that such thoughts and practices seemed less those of a young and promising Church of England cleric who tragically died before his promise could be fulfilled than those of a Roman Catholic monk (circa the Middle Ages). To many, Hurrell Froude’sRemains were scandalous. They called out, Beware!The Papists are coming!

The archdeacon was appalled by the criticism. To him Hurrell, in his self-enforced celibacy, his exaggerated sense of sin, his humiliation of the flesh, was simply the saintliest of Church of England clerics. There was nothing but piety in his avoidance of girls and his detestation of marriage. I take shame to myself, he wrote to Keble, for the little share I can claim in laying a foundation for such genuine piety as marked the latter years of his life. Whenever Anthony got in trouble (which was often) he was advised by his father, John Keble, and by scientifically minded brother William to reread theRemains. We adored Hurrell, Anthony insisted. He was sparkling brilliant, moved as a sort of king in the element which surrounded us.

The contrast between how the archdeacon fathered his oldest and his youngest son is quite remarkable. When Hurrell was an undergraduate and needed money at Oxford, he could write flippantly: You might as well have answered my most agreeable & interesting letter at an earlier period, but to pass over any little cause of complaint which I may keep in store for a future occasion, hereby I give notice that I am safe arrived at Keble’s [then his Oxford tutor] without a farthing, which may suggest to you the propriety of supplying that deficiency at any rate soon.

Hurrell could joke with his father, jolly him out of anything, even before he matured into a churchman. In that maturity, the archdeacon appears to have found the father, the companion and familiar friend he had never known. Arriving home from Oxford late one cold January night, thirty-year-old Hurrell found on getting upstairs that my Father had got out of bed to receive me. I sat up with him till one—& drank brandy & water—no bad thing under such circumstances.

Newman, too, was devoted to Hurrell, never coming to grips with his dark side, even as he used theRemains to further radicalize the English church through Hurrell’s monklike practices and confessions. Overlooked was the sadistic streak in Hurrell, a true cruelty that terrorized Anthony as a child. It had homoerotic nuances that appeared, judging by theRemains, to frighten Hurrell as well.

Anthony had been just two when Hurrell, a young man of seventeen, was forced by illness home from school to Dartington Parsonage. "A letter of my mother’s at the beginning of hisRemains described how he had terrified his baby brother by acting wolf to him, Anthony wrote. The baby was myself, sufficiently inclined already to imaginative alarms, and he continued to amuse himself with playing half seriously upon my fancy. His own mind was distinctly inclined to believe in the supernatural. Perhaps he thought that we could not be too early imbued with the same disposition."

Hurrell caused grief not only to baby Anthony but to his other siblings and, most important, to his dying mother. The letter she wrote to an imaginary, impartial Sir was actually meant for